The poetry of knowing

Logarhythms

Niran Okewole

74pp; Khalam Editions

"Several ideas utilised in this volume are direct derivatives of an unconscious osmotic process from ‘selectively eclectic' reading," Niran Okewole calmly informs the reader in the acknowledgements page of his debut collection of poetry, Logarhythms.

Delve into the poems, and this statement not only becomes clear, but also very quickly takes on the feel of ‘advance warning' - the intellectual equivalent of a ‘Parental Guidance' label. These poems are for a certain kind of reader. It would be tempting to call Okewole a "poet's poet", but I fear that might not be interpreted as the compliment it is meant to be.

A few years ago the poet inscribed, in a book belonging to me, a statement that he said approximated his manifesto as a poet; the defining ethos of his art. It is a quote from Wole Soyinka, defining poetry as a "progression of linked allusions towards an elucidation of the experience of reality."

These poems bear out their creator's belief, and understandably teem with allusions; this is a poet whose consciousness comfortably inhabits diverse worlds of learning and knowledge. From those worlds, the poet has invited literally hundreds of quirky characters to populate his poems. This is the poet as ambitious theatre director, seeking a cast that in sheer number alone will intimidate the audience. But it should not be surprising if one considers that Okewole is as much of a dramatist as he is a poet, (his second book is a collection of plays). "Tragoidia [a goat song]", one of the poems in Logarhythms, is actually a one-act play.

In many of these poems the poet is a character; his voice a self-assured, prodigiously aware one, which delights in open-ended questioning:

"What did Sylvia Plath find / when she opened the bell jar?" / Fascists? Crazy bees? The humming chorus / of a mad house where the / streams of Prozac-consciousness / flow beyond the urinals." ("West West Ground")

"Was the tower / of Babel a phallic menhir thrusting vainly in / search of the whoring skyhole? ("Stream")

In "Microcosmia" (part of the long poem, "Angola"), the questioning morphs into a doubtful stance. "Alms and the man are a Dauphin's heaven. / Shaw said that. He didn't." In "Entropia", it shows up as mischievous philosophizing. "Whatever is, is not." And then, in "The Unwritten Poem", a descent into perfect silence. White space.

That the poet was a medical student at the time most of these poems were written is manifest from the profuse medical jargon. Equally obvious is the kind of student he was - one who preferred to spend ward rounds "[h]iding behind a copy of Homer's Odyssey / ... / Editions of "Economist", Beckett's Malone / Dies, Whoroscope..." (Stream)

"Deceit keeps the book open on the table: must / give the impression of reading to chance callers, / though my receptors find no more binding sites" is his rueful confession in "Waiting". Compared to the tomes of medical books that must be surmounted on the way to becoming a qualified doctor, "[t]he Times Culture Supplement is / far more appealing: Umberto Eco on Kant and / the Platypus, Harold Bloom on Shakespeare, / Nadine Gordimer..."

‘Time' is an outsized motif in Logarhythms. "Death of a Timepiece" is an elegy to a beloved watch that taught the poet "to forget time." When it tragically falls from the poet's hand, down "four flights of stairs", the resulting grief inspires this profound lamentation: "on your concrete grave / your face assumed a grotesque beauty / but your heart was dead. / Like time."

But elsewhere Time is not dead, but instead full of a strange sort of aliveness. "The clock on the mantelpiece, / telling time backwards, says / it is always midnight in Tel Aviv." ("For Yehuda Amichai")

And in "First Rain", Time oscillates between life and death. "Two clocks, embalmed, one lives again, / the shadow life of a second hand." In Entropia, Time's two faces, "Kronos" and "Kairos" are "two monkeys in a circus act", and the "future", by being "a guillotined Miss Easypiss, / flowing into the past", is a reminder of Tel Aviv's strange clock.

Logarhythms is divided into four sections, or "Logs". There is a substantial quantity of autobiographical detail, the most interesting of which are the intimations of ill-fated romantic quests. ("I am a veteran of many lostlovewars, / ... / Love, she was the storybookgirl who / never became real")

The book's epigraph is the blunt query: "what is Poetry?", attributed to Pontius Pilate, a subversion of the Roman Prefect's famous query to Christ: "What is Truth?"

Pages later, the poet, standing in a mortuary and meditating on death, offers an answer: "This also is Poetry, / cold nip in the air, / grey landscape conjured from racial memory..." ("Cold, windy morning").

But the reader is tempted to come to a different conclusion. That Poetry is Knowing. In the last line of Windows, the first poem in the book, the poet declares: "Not cogito, ergo sum. I know. I know."

It is no mere boast. This poet knows; and a humble acceptance of that fact - apart from a heightened curiosity and an encyclopaedia - is sine qua non for anyone seeking to be moved by these amazing poems.